Is There Any Such Thing as a Primitive Language?

Simple, complex, degenerate and primitive languages are figments of the imagination. Languages like English, with only a few changes in the endings, are said to have a simple grammar, but can be very complicated in the way use is made of small words like ‘the’ and ‘of’.

‘George plays the piano’ sounds
like a simple comment until you ask the
question ‘Which piano?’ My African
students could never understand why
we don’t say ‘George plays a piano’,
because they were taught that the piano
means a particular piano. The answer
of course is not ‘This piano’, or ‘That
piano’, but ‘Any and every piano’. This
type of usage of ‘the’ is irregular because
‘the’ also means ‘the only one’ or
‘a particular one’. For example, if you
say, ‘The dog bit me’, you don’t usually
mean that just any dog bit you or every
dog bit you, but that a particular dog of
which you are now painfully aware bit
you.

While English people usually do
not see that this degree of flexibility for
the meaning of a tiny word ‘the’ is
difficult, many people from other language
groups find it so.

Since all languages communicate
equally well for those who naturally
use them, no language is degenerate in
that sense. Any language can communicate any idea if you take the trouble to
work on it.

Since all modern races are descended
from Noah and his sons, who
had a complex level of technology, for
example shipbuilding, metalcraft,
farming, etc., the so-called primitive
races are not primitive at all. They
should rather be called ‘ultimative’—(‘primus’ is Latin for ‘first’ and ‘ultimus’
is Latin for ‘last’). The so-called
primitive races are at the end of a chain
of dissolution of the civilization and
culture of their ancestor, Noah.

This is why the anthropologist cannot
make up a consistent picture of the
evolution of culture from primitive to
advanced. It simply never happened
that way. As for the languages of
‘ultimative societies’, they are often so
complex in grammar that people who
speak English find them very difficult.
This is true even of many languages
which have easy vocabularies compared
with English.

A million people in south-west
Uganda use the following ‘word’—tiwaakukiba haire—to mean
‘wouldn’t you have given it to them?’
All parts in this word have specified
meanings, for example ha = give, ti =
not, w = you, aaka = would, ire = have,
and ki = it. The English person trying
to fit all these pieces together regards it
as incredibly complex.

Actually, the question of the complexity
of a language is a purely relative
one. For any foreigner, a language may
be complex when he uses his own
familiar language system as the point of
comparison. But it is obvious from the
ease with which the national speakers
use the language that the greater complexity
simply isn’t there.

However, it we take as our reference
point the relatively ‘moo-ving’
communication of a cow, then men’s
immense language abilities, and the
overwhelming complexities of the languages
themselves, point to only one
thing. Man was created with language.

Newsletter

Thank You!

Thank you for signing up to receive email newsletters from Answers in Genesis.

Whoops!

Your newsletter signup did not work out. Please refresh the page and try again.

Answers in Genesis is an apologetics ministry, dedicated to helping Christians defend their faith and proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ effectively. We focus on providing answers to questions about the Bible—particularly the book of Genesis—regarding key issues such as creation, evolution, science, and the age of the earth.